"... Cusimano is undoubtedly a painter in the Surrealist line and
one can find in his work a quantity of elements (mainly serial and assumed as a distinguishing
badge) from the great school of which he is a continuer. But a feature that sets him apart from the
maximum archetypes of the movement initiated by Breton, and by Soupault with his fundamental text
Les champs magnetiques (1919), is the absence of irony.
Cusimano observes and dreams the world with wide-eyed seriousness,
he gets lost in it unsmiling. His sole distance from this world is that between the brush and the
canvas. Irony implies an attitude of superiority towards what one portrays, whereas Cusimano puts
himself on the same plane as his creatures, his mysterious objects, or rather he looks at them as
if spellbound by their own enigmatic presence. His gift as an essentially lyric painter lies also
in this relative ingenuousness.
As an eloquent example of this, one could take a painting like
Romantic Harmony (1966), in which a chalice set on a
sort of altar enclosed in a niche seems to emit roses and rose-leaves against a luminously unreal
sky. But what kind of lyricism is at issue here? Not an inert lyricism, that is for sure; rather, I
would say, a decidedly erotic lyricism, "darkened" by a mystico-religious element. Here Surrealist
heraldry (in an absolutely non-blasphemous key) overlaps with alchemical heraldry in which, as we
know, erotic impulses become sublimated into a species of ceremonial and iconic paralysis.
Cusimano's eroticism makes use of various stylistic features of the
Surrealist school, but judiciously. Mockery and desacration are not among his muses..."
Mario Lunetta
